IFF Develops Perfume Coffret

International Flavors & Fragrances perfumers Christophe Laudamiel and Christoph Hornetz, with the help of Thierry Mugler, have created the Perfume Coffret, a limited-edition box set of 15 fragrances designed to link perfumery with literature and cinema. The fragrances are based on Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murder, which has been turned into a movie set to release in the United States in January. Laudamiel and Hornetz initiated the project in 2000, and over the last six years have created 14 scents from the highly descriptive passages throughout scenes in the novel. The 15th fragrance in the set, Aura, is designed to enhance and intensify any fragrance with which it’s worn—or it can be used by itself.

With names such as Baby, Ermite, Human Existence and Orgie, the assortment showcases IFF’s ability to translate abstract concepts into scents, capturing the mood and tone of the novel while expanding the company’s own fragrance palette. For example, in the Baby fragrance, the perfumers wanted to emulate the sweet-sour and milky scent of a baby’s skin with a composition of 25 different ingredients. In the Human Existence fragrance, the perfumers attempted the passing odors of sweaty bodies, the sour odors of cheese and sides of raw meat hanging in sidewalk stall. For this, Hornetz said they used a scent composed of natural malt absolute containing notes reminiscent of cheese, along with a laboratory-created reconstruction of civet, cumin for acridness and Skatol, a lab-developed molecule that smells like animal secretions in addition to sardines, chocolate and black currant.

To begin with, 1,500 coffrets have been created; each will retail for €550, or $700. It will be marchandised on the Thierry Mugler Web site, www.perfume.thierrymugler.com, in mid-November and shipping in December.

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